On Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch" in a Time of Forbidden Touch
Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch" perfectly captures the agonizing isolation that so many of us have been experiencing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
My unofficial theme song throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch". Not the polished, light-industrial, somewhat sterile album version from Security (1982), the fourth of his self-titled records, but the live version found on 1983's Plays Live-which was, incidentally, recently (and somewhat anachronistically) rereleased in its full 2CD format.
My attachment to the live version is prompted in part by the fact that the live music experience has, of course, been one of many social interactions in America to either disappear or take on a hue of contagion since March 2020. This has, somewhat paradoxically, given any concert recording a fresh quality of the archival, the antique. Generally, I don't enjoy "live recordings". Why listen to something muddied by indistinct yelling from the audience, errors by the band, and long improvisations when one could engage with a song without mediation? The live recording of 1982's "I Have the Touch", however, mediates this experience in quite a different way that is phenomenological and, in these times, highly political.
What makes Gabriel's song uniquely appropriate to its live setting is its exceptionally clear linkage between content and environment. The song's narration yearns for contact, which, when heard against the backdrop of the crowd's presence and engagement, establishes an odd sort of disjunction/connection: Gabriel cries out for touch, which-as the song's title unequivocally states-is something he already has. He is together, in the concert hall, with others who are touching one another. And yet, he remains apart from his audience.
"Such a mass of motion, do not know where it goes / I move with the movement and, I have the touch". Outside of a concert setting, the lyrics sound aspirational- they take the shape of observance, or a wish to "speak-into-existence". And yet a separation remains. There's the sense that even being with the motion of the moment is not enough to understand it, to connect entirely with those who share the space, to become indistinguishably part of the mass, to comprehend and surrender to its agency. Moving with the movement is not yet enough to take touch beyond the quality of personal ownership. Most of us have touch, possess the sense, have even, perhaps, found movements with which to move over the course of the pandemic. And yet we are still deprived of touching, of that act that requires contact with another.
The isolated stasis during the pandemic is beautifully, agonizingly - if not intentionally - encapsulated by the bridge and outro that close Gabriel's song:
Pull my chin, stroke my hair, scratch my nose, hug my knees / Try drink, food, cigarette, tension will not ease / I tap my fingers, fold my arms, breathe in deep, cross my legs / Shrug my shoulders, stretch my back, but nothing seems to please / I want contact
Yes, I want contact as well. Maybe you do too. We can touch our own bodies, hug ourselves, distract ourselves with other sensations, assume postures that fold our bodies upon themselves in a simulation of exchange, attempt to stretch and extend the limits of our corporeality. But if it is touch that we crave if it is a tension-an internal tautness-that asks to be released beyond the scope of one's self, then none of these exercises can satisfy. We become trapped in the waiting, trapped in our somatic limits, prodding at the borders of our bodies, bending and expanding and creasing them in a dance that can only ever fall short of contact.
Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has wonderfully conceptualized the importance and collaborative quality of touch, and I'd like to bring Nancy's notion into contact with Gabriel's, allowing them to brush up against one another in precisely the kind of uncertain, undetermined encounter that Gabriel's narrator longs for. Touching, Nancy tells us, is the very condition of being in the world, of having a world, of coming to know something like reality and matter. What we can touch takes the shape of the known and possible for us-and this is not only, of course, what we can touch with the tips of our fingers but also with our many senses and thoughts, with all of the ways in which we send our bodies out and come to know the world and its others.
As we learn the world and what's in it, as something we never cease doing, it becomes ours while remaining entirely its own, even while becoming mutually entangled with us. As when I touch your face, had we known one another in the past, had we had that impossibly intimate relationship where such a thing becomes possible: I know you then, differently, feel the give of your flesh, the drop of your cheek, the smooth warmth. That comes into my world as I come into yours-and yet it is not mine at all. "[N]either pure continuity nor pure discontinuity: touching" (Nancy 1997).
This continuity/discontinuity at play together is fully at work in "I Have the Touch". The gregariousness, the possibility of a happy, somewhat bumbling "chance collision" that Gabriel illuminates, tug at this idea of togetherness, of collaborative welcoming amid total uncertainty. It grabs hold of this Nancean notion of a needful touch that swells and contrasts without assimilating. In touch, Nancy tells us in the first volume of Corpus, "Nothing gets through" (2008). There is none of that penetrative energy at work, that piercing and spearing and even killing that might come to mind when we think of touching someone sexually. Or, more pointedly, the kind of touch that's at work in the murderous sense of touching someone, of getting them touched, as in, for instance, Three-6 Mafia's 1995 song "Gotta Touch 'Em, Pt. 2".
This is not, of course, to say that sexuality has been sapped from Gabriel's vision, or Nancy's, for that matter. Rather our sex, both as our understanding of our identity and our intercourse with others, names the manner in which, touching intimately upon the body of the other, we slide with and up against the other ever so closely, as Nancy writes (2008).
Three-6 Mafia's possessive form of touch is not, in its outset, far from the touch that Gabriel tells us that he has, but in the former case, the violence of touch is made to retain its insularity to function as a threat, weaponized so that the other might, in being touched, be kept at bay or swallowed up entirely. We will not share this touch, I will impose it upon you. Gabriel's vision of collaborative touch is in its execution quite different, being rather characterized by a hospitality to a difference that is unknown:
Hello, how do you do? / All those introductions, I never miss my cue / So before a question, so before a doubt / My hand moves out and, I have the touch
We can't miss the very relatable, slightly goofy, and overenthusiastic energy at work in this vision of Gabriel the overcaffeinated social butterfly. It's as if he's rushing about at a bowling alley get-together, say, or an after-work pub crawl, clasping the many hands of his bemused fellows. There must be a practiced tact, of course-he can read the cues-but his earnestness, his insistence, are disarming and mildly amusing. No time for questions, uncertainties, or small talk: an introduction, a smile, and his hand shoots toward the other's as the contact taking place so briefly and preciously is cherished before he rushes to meet the next person.
Dare We Risk Touch?
There's something ethical and political to the democracy of Gabriel's touch here, a kind of total welcome approaching the radical vision of hospitality that Jacques Derrida has articulated. It's utterly open and risky-which only emphasizes the need to constantly attempt to practice it (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000). That riskiness certainly weighs heavily on us at the moment-I doubt there are many of us who will feel comfortable for quite a long time, if ever, with shaking a long series of unknown hands.
We should be wary of another kind of riskiness: does the other want to be touched? Do they want to involve themselves in a socialite, communal flesh-pressing that seems to me that it might hold some vaguely masculine shape? (I can't, for now, think of handshaking without unbidden visions rising of Trump's hypermasculine, predatory, magnetic greetings with world leaders. He so often looked as if he were attempting to pull them inside himself-quite another version entirely of getting somebody touched.)
Gabriel's total hospitality comes out most directly, but briefly, in the second verse. Here something startling takes place that the emphasis on handshakes would seem to preclude: we find that the other of our touch need not be human.
There you stand before me, all that fur and all that hair / Oh, do I dare? I have the touch
Here "having the touch" is a kind of self-reassurance, a reminding oneself that yes, I dare, for my position from the start has been that I have this capacity for touch that must be exercised at every opportunity. "I have the touch" is also a kind of immediate note, letting us know at the instant of the touch that this touch with an Other, who is radically unknown is, descriptively speaking, no different from the generally banal touch of our handshakes at the corporate meeting. That is; it takes on an identical grammar handed down from the song's title, despite the harrowing uncertainties of identifying its object.
But who is this Other? Whose determining traits are fur and the capacity for standing? The line makes me think of a dog, most obviously, and of the anxiety and reticence involved at present in touching even a dog, of approaching another passing at a vaguely acceptable distance on a sidewalk, say, on an afternoon walk. The dog, who has little interest in Covid protocols, evinces the kind of indiscriminate excitement at touching and knowing someone that Gabriel's narrator does. Those immortal words arise-"can I pet the dog?"-likely unspoken, as we pass, eyes askance, each practicing the flimsy pretext of simple obliviousness.
Except, in all likelihood, the dog. This is truly a do I dare? Do I dare risk angering the dog's companion, who may perceive my touching (and, we shudder to think, perhaps not wrongly) as a contaminating that will then pass to them and their loved ones? Do I dare risk the same to myself? The epidemiological logic that we have been forced to view our world through forces us to see this dog as primarily a possible carrier of infection, as a vector.
Although this vision of a furry, touchable Other makes me think of my many (always avoided) encounters with canine others on those occasions on which I have ventured into the wild that the outside has become, Gabriel's lyrics only make room for specific speculation of this kind, they do not assert it. It's truly only the introduction of fur that makes one pause, the aura of someone erect before us carrying what can only be a descriptor of the animal, the mammalian. Or is "all that fur", and then, "all that hair", a kind of blinking, a self-correction, made necessary by "the dark" in which the encounter takes place?
Is this perhaps only a poorly lit run-in with an individual in a heavy fur coat? But then why would daring be needed? Unless, of course we can't shake the sense that this one before us yet retains something uncanny about them, something that is human, maybe, but not quite.
This need not send us down the path to reading the song's lines as a meeting with some kind of wolfman-although perhaps the apparently dubious humanity of this other treads in that realm of the Freudian uncanny, that unsettling presence of something that both is and is not us, repeating our body with a difference. Moving in this direction could potentially lead us to a link with Gabriel's own discussion of the song. We can take a cue from the psychological discourse on touch as an essential component of brain development in infants.
More interesting than a kind of correlative, accumulative concept of touch-more contact equals better "development", etc.-is the possibility of reinvesting the infantile sense of uncertainty that Freud posits. Freud describes the uncanny as taking place "when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression". (Leaving aside here the more fraught aspect of the uncanny that describes the resurgence of "primitive beliefs"; Freud 2017).
The touch of Gabriel's song, from this Freudian perspective, seems to willfully draw out the uncanny-rather than avoiding the disconcerting furriness (or is it only a fuzziness?) of our shadowy companion. Rather than further repressing or running from that nonhuman specter that disquietingly overlaps with our own so-sure humanity, we might instead reach out, touch them. We should indeed "revive" those senses of others that we have set aside by allowing them to impress their lives upon ours, their flesh upon ours. It's like creating an "impression" in the physical sense that the papermaker does: making a mark, leaving a stamp. This requires a return to infantile wonder, a willful forgetting of the stratifications that structure our social world in the time of pandemics.
We should be very wary of the ways that Gabriel invests this scene of an uncertain encounter with darkness and dehumanization, as we should look with suspicion upon the certainty that "fur" takes us immediately beyond the human. Is not "fur" also used to describe body hair, particularly that of women (by men), in a reflection of this nonhuman logic? Even (especially?) so, we can read the lines as evincing a kind of hospitality that overcomes prejudice and makes way for a touching that precludes racism, sexism, anthropocentrism. I want to make contact with you because you are different. Because I can't bear touching only myself. I can't continue to close in upon myself.
This is risky, it requires daring, and it requires hospitality, but it is "the thing I understand" as Gabriel sings-the only thing. I understand that only you have the capacity to tap me into a different world, and I may do the same for you. We understand that by touching each other we might understand one another and the world differently.
Perhaps very soon we will be able to again touch one another. Perhaps mass vaccination will make possible the unreservedness of Gabriel's touch. Perhaps we will have casual touch again. Perhaps not. It has certainly become conceivable over the course of the preceding months that the future of touch is not to be one of absolute "security" (to recall the album housing the original version of "I Have the Touch"). We can only at present wait-wait for "ignition", wait for the "spark". Wait for the time when you and I might collide and feel joy. When fear has ebbed.
If this sounds naïve-and I think it does and should-it should only remind us of how out of touch we have become with the possibilities for the world, and perhaps how out of touch our world has always been with itself.
Only, only, wanting contact I'm / Only, only, wanting contact with you
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford University Press. 2000.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3rd ed., edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Translated by James Strachey. Wiley Blackwell. 2017. pp. 592-614.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Fordham University Press. 2008. pp. 2-121.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Minnesota Archive Ed., translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. University of Minnesota Press. 1997.
